


Arco Iris

by taykash



Category: Arashi (Band)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 03:11:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3234119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taykash/pseuds/taykash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jun is 5, and Sho is practically an adult at 7. But they connect anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arco Iris

**Author's Note:**

> I've been suffering from the world's worst case of writer's block so I wrote this just to prove I can still put some words down even if they're not great.   
> Posted to LJ [here](http://taykash.livejournal.com/14908.html).

Sho never cared about rainbows. They were just a natural phenomenon that was listed in the later part of his textbook, colorful arcs across the sky that got a quick acknowledgement before being ignored for something more important. Rainbows were for kids, cute appliques on kindergarten smocks and homemade lunch bags. 

Sho knew who Matsumoto Jun was even though they weren’t in the same school. Jun was two years younger than him, but they had met when they were both enrolled in the same children’s soccer league. Jun quit fairly quickly, and Sho not long after, but then Sho kept seeing him around. Jun must have lived in the neighborhood because Sho would see him in parks or at the supermarket with his mother, a woman who always kept her hair in such a tight bun Sho could see the strain on her temples.

Jun was a kid though, a five-year-old who still made dirt balls and played with blocks. Sho was practically an adult already, seven years old, with his calligraphy brushes and randoseru backpack. They existed in overlapping spheres, dancing around each other’s existences like figurines in a music box, aware of each other but never coming into contact.

Sho had a little sister, a baby named Mai who cried all the time and took his mom’s attention. His father spent all his time at work so after Mai was born, Sho suddenly found himself without company most of the time. 

He usually walked home from school with a girl named Izumi, daughter of a family friend who also went to his school, but one day she was home sick so Sho took the long way home. The route winded through the residential neighborhood, passing by two parks – one very large, full of tall trees and dark spaces, and one very small, with concrete animals that had smiley faces and saddles. Sho aimed for the small park, sitting on the swing and kicking his feet into the dirt. His shoes were new, black patent leather as demanded by his school uniform, and he watched the dust puff up into little clouds with each kick and turn the shininess dull.

It was a warm spring day in mid-April and the school year had just begun. Most of Sho’s friends had their after-school classes to go to, whether it was cram school or calligraphy or piano or other forced hobbies that their parents wanted them to participate in so they could grow up to be proper adults. Sho usually had classes, but with the birth of his sister, his mother hadn’t had time to find him a new extracurricular to participate in yet other than his standard weekly piano lessons on Saturday afternoons.

A breeze blew through the park, ruffling the ribbon on his hat. There were a few toddlers playing in the sandbox on the other side of the playground, their mothers diligently watching from park benches next to huge strollers. 

“Hi.” The small voice startled Sho from staring at his now-dirty shoes and Sho glanced down to his right. It was Jun, small enough that he wasn’t eye level with Sho yet even though Sho was sitting on the swing. Sho didn’t know how he remembered his name, but Jun had such large, emotion-filled eyes that he was hard to forget. 

“Didn’t you play soccer?” Jun asked, his small hands gripping the strap of the bag slung over his chest. He had his lunch bag, a thermos, and a large homemade protection charm all worn across his body, making him look even smaller than he was. 

“I stopped. You stopped too,” Sho replied. 

“I like baseball better,” Jun said, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “It’s more fun. I like catching the ball.”

“Baseball takes too long to play,” Sho grumbled, looking away from Jun. “What do you want?”

“You looked sad.” Jun went to the swing next to Sho, struggling to get up on the swing. Sho just watched as he finally hoisted his knee up and maneuvered his small body into a sitting position. His legs swung freely beneath the rubber seat, his feet kicking at the air.

“I’m not sad,” Sho finally said with a shrug. 

“Do you want to be friends?” Jun grinned. “We can play whatever you want, it doesn’t have to be baseball. I like lots of games! We can play tag.” Jun tried to swing as he spoke, but he couldn’t get momentum because of the weight of all the items slung over his chest.

Sho sighed and stood up from his swing, moving behind Jun and pushing him gently. “I don’t want to play tag.”

Jun giggled as the swing began to get higher and higher, his short hair fluttering in the wind and falling on his face. “What about hide and seek?”

“I’m seven, I don’t play those baby games.” Sho pushed and pushed until Jun was managing by himself, then he stepped away to get back onto his own swing. “I don’t want to play anything.”

Jun was ignoring what Sho was saying, laughing into the wind, when his feet got tangled in the dangling strings of his lunch bag. The momentum of the swing and the weight of his body pulled him off the swing and face first onto the ground.

Sho jumped up the moment Jun started to wail, helping Jun to sit up. Jun was covered in dirt and had split his lip, blood dirtying his mouth and chin as it mixed with his tears.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Sho said soothingly, the way his mother said to his baby sister when she cried, and he pulled out his handkerchief. It had Ultraman on it, and he loved it, but he pressed it to Jun’s mouth. Sho was used to split lips because sometimes his right leg didn’t know what his left was doing when he ran and he’d trip. The blood was scary, but Sho wasn’t a kid anymore. He could help Jun.

Jun kept crying, though, and Sho looked around to see if he could think of anything. None of the mothers on the other side of the playground had noticed, and their part of the park was deserted.

“Hey, Jun, if you stop crying, I’ll be your friend,” Sho finally said, brushing some of the dirt off of Jun’s uniform. “Okay? We can play tag if you want.”

“Really?” Jun was still hiccupping and sniffling, streaking more dust across his face when he wiped at his eyes with his dirty hands.

“Yeah, we can play whatever you want, okay? Let’s clean your face.” Sho helped Jun up, making sure the handkerchief was still pressed to Jun’s lip. He walked Jun over to the water fountain next to the playground, wetting his hand and passing it over Jun’s face to try to get some of the dirt off.

The cut on Jun’s lip was shallow and stopped bleeding within a few minutes. Sho threw his handkerchief away, then helped Jun dust off his uniform. “Do you feel better?”

Jun nodded, then looked down at his bag. Sho watched as Jun carefully looked through the items that were cradled inside the homemade cloth bag, then Jun finally pulled something out and presented it to Sho.

“Here! Since we’re friends.” A palm-sized sticker of a rainbow sat in the middle of Jun’s hand. “You can have this.”

Sho’s first instinct was to turn it down. Rainbows were for _babies_ , but Jun was smiling even though his face was still dirty in places and his lip was beginning to swell.

“Thank you,” Sho said, kneeling down to take his backpack off. He hesitated for a moment, but placed the rainbow sticker in the bottom left corner of the front of the backpack. 

“Let’s go get some candy,” Sho suggested, and Jun nodded with a big grin. “Okay!” Sho grabbed his hand and led him out of the park, heading towards the neighborhood candy store.

When Sho got home, he looked at the rainbow sticker, bright against the black leather. His sister was asleep in her swing, cozy and warm. 

Sho got out some paper and his crayons and carefully drew a rainbow, following the pattern on the sticker. He rummaged in the utility drawer in the kitchen for some tape, and then stuck the rainbow to his sister’s swing.

“Now we’re friends,” he said to her as she swung back and forth. “We can play whatever you want.”

Sho made a drawing for Jun, too, and kept it in his backpack in anticipation of the next time he saw Jun. It was a little less than a week later when Sho spotted Jun walking home from school with two other boys, one of them walking with a Game Boy in his hand and the other stopping every ten feet to peer at the window box flowers growing at each house.

Sho stopped in front of them, his heart pounding. “Hi,” he said, pushing his chest out to show off his school logo. None of the three boys were in uniform, and the one with the Game Boy stared at Sho with a frown.

“Hi!” Jun said, smiling toothily. Sometime in the past week he’d lost one of his bottom front teeth, and it changed his smile from the one Sho had known.

“Here,” Sho said, thrusting the paper out at Jun. “Bye.” Sho turned around and ran, his lunch bag hitting the back of his backpack as he fled, leaving three confused kindergartners behind him.

“Who was that?”

“My friend,” Jun said, staring at the drawing. The rainbow’s colors were arranged incorrectly and the lines were crooked, but the colors were bright and welcoming. “He’s my friend.”

“You have weird friends.”

When Jun didn’t respond, his other friend nudged the speaker in the ribs. “Nino, you’re weird too.”

Jun folded the drawing carefully into a square and tucking it inside the protective charm his mom had made him before hugging the charm to his chest. His friends bickered behind them as they walked, but Jun didn’t hear any of it. 

‘I want to grow up like that,’ Jun thought as he squeezed the charm. ‘Like a big brother.’ 

Jun kept the drawing in the charm even after he graduated from kindergarten and went on to elementary school, old enough to leave the charm at home in his desk drawer. But even as he grew up and graduated from successive levels of education, on hard days all he had to do was unfold the drawing – so old and loved by the time he moved out of his parents’ house that it was falling apart at the creases – and he would feel better, motivated to do his best.

In his new home, the first thing he did was tuck the old, worn drawing in the desk drawer of his office, underneath where his laptop and drawing tablet for his design work would go.

“Jun!” Sho called from the first floor, where he was supposed to be unpacking the living room books. “I can’t find the damn tea kettle!”

Jun sighed, shut his drawer, and headed downstairs to help his boyfriend.


End file.
